Amy Tan The Valley of Amazement

American writer Amy Tan’s bestselling books include The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Much of her writing draws on family experiences and stories, of what it means to be Chinese migrants to America. Among her influences, she cites the ghosts of both her parents, now dead.

Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement, has a complicated relationship to family stories. When she was looking at photographs of her grandmother from the 1910s, she realised they were remarkably similar to other photographs she had seen of concubines in the same period. The fashions, even the look of the subject, were coded in particular ways. From there, she did intensive research into the lives of these women.

But Amy Tan could not say, definitively, that her grandmother was a concubine; and parts of her family strongly resist this interpretation.

So instead, the writer has used her research as the basis for a fictional version of Shanghai, in which an American woman - Lucia - runs a high-class house in Shanghai; and her daughter Violet ends up walking a similar path.